Local businesses use Web in different ways

Published: Friday, April 26, 2013 5:30 a.m. CST

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(Rob Winner – rwinner@shawmedia.com)

Cook Meg Sisk (front) prepares a herb roasted vegetable soup as Gail Roloff, owner of Rural Girl Soups, prepares a zucchini pepper jack soup Tuesday at a kitchen in Geneva. Orders for the soup are taken online, then prepared on Tuesday and delivered to customers in DeKalb county every Wednesday.

As owner and operator of Rural Girl Soups, an online specialty food delivery service, Roloff has found herself dropping off soup to places so rural, they don’t even have road signs. But that doesn’t stop Roloff.

“I can always try to figure it out,” she said.

Based in DeKalb, Rural Girl Soups is somewhat unusual in that all of its transactions are processed online. Her website, www.ruralgirlsoups.com, is a virtual storefront, but businesses across DeKalb County are relying more heavily on their websites. Some, including Pita Pete’s in DeKalb and Sweet Earth Jewelry in Sycamore, use their websites to supplement their brick-and-mortar stores.

Rural Girl Soups’ customers place items in a virtual shopping cart on the website and purchase them through PayPal, an online wallet linked to their bank account.

Roloff receives her online orders, which must be placed by noon on Sundays to be delivered that week, prepares the soups on Tuesdays and delivers them on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Customers leave a cooler with ice packs outside their door, and come home to find the soup waiting for them.

But Rural Girl Soups is more than what the name suggests; she’s added desserts, baked goods and hummus.

“I just started in 2012 [and] I only sold soup,” Roloff said. “Four months after that, people were asking for more.”

The World Wide Web provides only a portion of the overall sales for Pita Pete’s at 901 Lucinda Ave. in DeKalb. Similar to the online ordering process Roloff uses, Pita Pete’s customers can place orders for carryout or delivery with a click of the mouse.

The restaurant, owned by Leslie Metz and Peter Lutz, generates about 10 percent of its sales through online orders, Metz said.

Online ordering services offered through CampusSpecial.com and Foodler.com have made the entire ordering experience much easier for customers and staff for the past seven years, she said.

“I think it’s very convenient,” she said. “Especially if [customers are] at work and don’t have the time to call. And it’s nice when it’s just on one sheet of paper for us.”

When a customer submits an order online at www.pitapetes.com, Pita Pete’s gets a fax with the details and an automated phone call notifying them of the order. They then make the food and send it out as soon as possible, Metz said.

But online ventures aren’t just taking place in the food industry.

Transforming their website into a more e-commerce type of business is something Sweet Earth Jewelry owners Rich and Roseann Para hope to do in the future.